Cumartesi, Kasım 15, 2014

“The first thing that struck me
when I read his poems was the fact that he repeatedly delves into the eyes of
his lovers. He drinks his lover's eyes like absinthe; her eyes are the stream
and he is the river man. The lover becomes
her eyes; she becomes an abstract, murky realm of sexual subconscious.”

(Türkçe Özet aşağıda)

Drinker of Eyes:
Introduction to The First English Translations of Arthur Cravan

Anna
O’Meara

“I cannot understand how, for forty long
years, Victor Hugo could work. All literature is ta ta ta ta ta ta. Art! What
hinges me to art? Shit! In the name of God.” - Arthur Cravan, Maintenant #3

The man sometimes known as Arthur Cravan made a reputation
for himself partly through violent theatrics. He shot a gun over the heads of
his audience, he threw a boxing match in order to gain funds to traverse the
ocean to New York City, and, finally, in an act of great negation, he got lost
on a sail boat in the gulf of Mexico and never returned. A defiant proletarian,
Cravan writes in such a way that spits in the face of his contemporary artists
for their haughtiness and their old age, as well as for their lack of interest
in danger and women. It's no wonder that the surrealists and the Situationists
gravitated toward him.

SHORT STORIES

It would be a great injustice to overlook the fact that
Cravan's stories are often hilarious. He writes with a combination of boldness
and equivocal honesty. His boldness manifests in the fact that he is unafraid
to curse, exclaim, to kick even the most revered men (Oscar Wilde), and to run
aimlessly into the night “like a stupid cunt.” At the same time, his humor
functions through the pivoting of equivocations. Cravan might start by saying
that he greatly admires a writer like Oscar Wilde. (We can imagine his audience
having some form of sympathy for this generally admired figure of the time.)
But shit! Wilde is old and ugly and useless! Or, similarly, Gide doesn't sleep
with whores! How could anyone respect him? In other scenarios, Cravan will
start his writing in despair. He is overcome with ennui and he hates all of
Paris! He doesn't want fame! But wait – he wants fame. But wait – he is lazy.
Or he “thinks happily to [himself], 'I will go see Gide. He is a millionaire.
No, how ridiculous! I want to negate his old literature!'” And so it goes. Most
likely, people in general can in some way identify with such equivocation.

It should be said that Cravan's specific hatred of Wilde and
Gide the old is not explicitly because of the fact that they are bourgeois.
Instead, Cravan is primarily prone to criticizing them for their old age. This may
seem a strange argument in a world that privileges so-called experience and
seasoning over the so-called immaturity and naïveté of youth. In society (and
in most literature), reverence for historical precedent is pervasive, yet
Cravan attributes virtue to youth and the present moment in history. This is
perhaps one of his most pivotal arguments that contributed to modernism and
later inspired the avant-garde from the 1930s through the 1970s. It is possible
to interpret Cravan's distrust toward elderly literary figures as a sort of
thanatos. He shows us revered contemporary literature as a literal rotting
corpse. As a result, Cravan's definition of good writing cannot be considered
part of the canon literature at all: good writing is instead a byproduct of an
eventful life. And Cravan, through accounts of his eventful life, not only
argues these points in his stories; he also achieves them.

POEMS

Cravan's poems must be discussed separately from his stories,
because they are a different beast. The first thing that struck me when I read
his poems was the fact that he repeatedly delves into the eyes of his lovers.
He drinks his lover's eyes like absinthe; her eyes are the stream and he is the
river man. The lover becomes her eyes; she becomes an abstract, murky
realm of sexual subconscious. Here, in her eyes, melancholy lurks—a beautiful
melancholy, yet, simultaneously, a grotesque one. Cravan incorporates themes of
the night and music, which seem, in a way, similar to the nocturnesque
intangibility of drinkable eyes. His poems ironically convey this intangibility
with bold, direct language. Who would expect exclamations in a nocturne? This
unique approach defines Cravan's effect: a mood that we might call a brash
ennui. The combination of bold exclamations and the intangible subconscious is
one that I find resonates as simultaneously unexpected and effective. It is
only fair that I provide an example. Here is his poem “The Drinker of Eyes,
Bendorp Sonnet”:

Eyes black with the clarity of a
diamond or agathis to have for nights with starless skies. Weary,he tilts
his head toward you, lovingly and jokingly, as he would to a child.
For the late love, a fire stirs the soul that inflames everything through
such green eyes with strange neurosis and perversity which persecutes with
uncatchable, obsessive fear. At this restless hour, he sees thenas their own
entity. Brilliant, lively gems in the claws of eyelashes; eyes of coralline and
opal. When night falls, muttering the halves of words by an armchair,
falling on his back, he distills and absinthe and sips a Bendorp cream!!!

TRAVEL

Born in Switzerland, Cravan is Francophone, of British
descent. He tells us that he is Oscar Wilde's nephew. He moves to Paris, and
then the United States. Before traversing the Atlantic, he appropriately
addresses the concept of the American. “Devastatingly, today, everyone is
American. It is necessary to be American, or appear to be, which is the same
thing,” he tells us. A rather prophetic sentiment. However, Cravan admires
certain aspects of the turn-of-the-century American, shedding light on his
historical context. To Cravan, the Americans are boxers with bowler hats who
ask for cigars and don't say “thank you” in return. (One of the most famous
photos of Cravan shows him wearing a bowler hat.) Americans are large, tough,
manly rogues who wear ill-fitting clothing and don't care about formalities.
Perhaps this is why some of the poorest and most pessimistic (and best) artists
of Paris at the turn-of-the-century moved to New York City, including Blaise
Cendrars, Cravan's contemporary. Cendrars, like Cravan, was known by a
pseudonym, and gravitated to New York for the toughness and the poverty that he
believed defined it. Cendrars and Cravan were both interested in New York City
as a center of the industrial proletariat, which was ideologically connected to
industrial innovation. Cravan writes that New York City is “the palace of the world, sparkling in its retina,
not in ultraviolet rays' the American telephone and the sweetness of
the elevators.” It seems appropriate to introduce the first English
translations of Cravan's writings with an acknowledgment of Cravan's
English-speaking background and idealized destination.

I can only imagine that Cravan, the
avid traveler who enjoyed visiting “women and dangerous places” like the United
States and all along the Mediterranean coast as he recounts, perhaps fictively,
in Maintenant 2, would be pleased to see his ideas and translations
spread through the efforts of people who notably detached from the pomp and
fame of artistic and literary circles. I wish to introduce Cravan, here, as a
figure of defiance rather than of canon. His defiance is perhaps his greatest
asset, as well as perhaps the reason that he hasn't been translated into
English before now. Finally, I would like to say that my first reading of
Cravan gave me a sense of great discovery, as though they have found the
shipwreck of Cravan's mysterious memory, which was previously drifting in the
abyss of the Gulf of Mexico like a bold but melancholy ghost. I hope that many
of you feel a similar excitement upon reading these translations.